Uttlesford

We had our weekend walk around Rowney Woods near Saffrom Walden and saw a couple of Buzzrads flying in the distance. Unusually, 1 of them left his usual area and gave us a fly past as he headed off to pastures new.

This female Sparrowhawk caught her dinner in our back garden – I noticed the fact when I walked into the kitchen to make a cup of tea…you couldn’t miss all those feathers. I was able to pop my lens through the cat flap to get to the birds eye-level and capture the action!

Another glorious day meant it was way to hot to venture out until 8.00pm in the evening. With sunset not until 9.20pm that’s not such a problem, the woods were still really dark with the heavy summer canopy blocking out much of the sunlight…so, this is a public footpath we (still) haven’t followed across the field of barley. I haven’t done any HDR for a while – so it was nice to run this shot through Photomatix to create this shot.

We had a walk around Garnetts Wood this afternoon…this shot was taken just before the heavens opened and we got soaked. On returning home (about 3 miles away) we found there had been no rain at all there!

Occasionally we get the odd Greylag Goose paying a visit to Doctors Pond and this chap was a fine specimen, strutting his stuff amongst the squabbling ducks and Canada Geese. Sad to report that we are down to 4 ducklings now from the original 7.